Solar power, submarines, why the sky is blue and space is black, aeroplanes, optics, robots, diving equipment, tanks, parachutes, astronomy, architecture, machine guns, cars, and human and animal anatomy; all were subjects that filled the waking and working hours and extensive notebooks of military and naval engineer Leonardo da Vinci, a handsome Florence-born aesthete, who perfumed his hands with lavender, had a sartorial penchant for the colour pink, and also happened to be an artist. It's a remarkable irony of Da Vinci's legacy; for a man whose scientific and investigative research in notebooks was so prodigious, his painted output was costive. Da Vinci, proclaimed by many as the world's most famous artist, painted just 16 artworks during his 67-year lifetime, or at least, only that number survived. He started hundreds, yet his conversion rate was low, or his attention span elsewhere so high, that he quickly acquired a reputation for being slow, if not indifferent. But that was only part of the story. Da Vinci was a perfectionist in matters of painting, working for five or six years on individual canvases, altering colours or shade, here and there, as he saw fit. Part of that is explained by the agony and ecstasy of newfound technology; Da Vinci's art moment coincided with the development of oil paint, and art's switch from tempura colour to oil. As such, art, and specifically painting, took on a whole new dimension, and layering, and Da Vinci was oil paint's pioneer. When his master Andrea del Verrochio saw Da Vinci's first work in oil, he proclaimed, according to Renaissance artist, writer and historian Giorgio Vasari: "Alas, my work is done". 

Imagine then, being an astronomer today and discovering a planet. Such a scientific finding could be likened to the discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci's painting, Salvator Mundi in 2005, thought to have been lost or destroyed, but which now represents a sale of biblical proportions through auction house Christie's in New York on November 15. Lest you think the planetary analogy is too grandiose, consider two of Da Vinci's canvases; the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. This latest discovery is the first since 1909, when the Benoit Madonna, now in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia, came to light. There are fewer Leonardo paintings in existence than there are Shakespeare plays, yet the work of these two reclusive men and their magnificence, set a course for Western culture that's still palpitant 500 hundred years later. Ironically, for two men who depicted humanity in such detail, neither left behind a defining self-portrait of themselves. 

Dating from around 1500, the enigmatic oil-on-panel Salvator Mundi depicts a half-length figure of Christ as Saviour of the World, facing frontally and dressed in flowing robes of lapis and crimson. He holds a crystal orb in his left hand as he raises his right hand in benediction. The painting was long believed to have existed but was generally presumed to have been destroyed until it was rediscovered in 2005.

The painting was first recorded in the Royal collection of King Charles I (1600-1649), and thought to have hung in the private chambers of Henrietta Maria – the wife of King Charles I – in her palace in Greenwich, and was later in the collection of Charles II. Salvator Mundi is next recorded in a 1763 sale by Charles Herbert Sheffield, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Buckingham, who put it into an auction following the sale of what is now Buckingham Palace to the king.

It then disappeared until 1900 when it was acquired by Sir Charles Robinson as a work by Leonardo’s follower, Bernardino Luini, for the Cook Collection, Doughty House, Richmond. By this time, its authorship by Leonardo, origins and illustrious royal history had been entirely forgotten, and Christ’s face and hair were overpainted. In the dispersal of the Cook Collection, it was ultimately consigned to a sale at Sotheby’s in 1958 where it sold for £45. It disappeared once again for nearly 50 years, emerging only in 2005 when it was purchased from an American estate at a small regional auction house. Its rediscovery was followed by six years of painstaking research to document its authenticity with the world’s leading authorities on the works and career of da Vinci.

“Salvator Mundi is a painting of the most iconic figure in the world by the most important artist of all time; the Holy Grail of the art world," says Loic Gouzer, Chairman, Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York. More remarkable still, is that despite the conservation process on the painting, both of Christ’s hands, the curls of his hair, the orb, and much of the drapery are well preserved and close to their original state. The painting retains a remarkable presence and haunting sense of mystery that is characteristic of Leonardo’s finest paintings. Above the left eye (right as we look) are still visible the marks that Leonardo made with the heel of his hand to soften the flesh.

British painter Lucien Freud once said he disliked the paintings of Raphael (a painter who learned a great deal from Leonardo and Michelangelo), because his faces look homogenised, more synthetic than particular and that “there’s no sense of weight, flesh, of the texture of the skin.” Da Vinci didn't just capture sensibility and skin anew, he made reality of art, he de-classicised the mannered heroics of Michelangelo (the two held a healthy dislike and disregard for one another's styles) and prioritised human vulnerability; he took art from the pantheon and made it the reality television of the Renaissance. And to see it in the flesh is a revelation at hand. And a reserve of US$100 million.  

Footnote: As of November 15, Salvator Mundi sold in New York for a record US$400 million.

Image: Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. Courtesy of Christie's Images Ltd. 2017